History of the M.E. Church, Vol. III - Media Sabda Org

He turned toward Savannah, to "see the former walks of dear Wesley and Whitefield," whom "he
hoped to meet in the New Jerusalem." On the last day of February, 1793, he reached the city, and the
next day went twelve miles to view the ruins of Whitefield's Orphan House. He gazed on the
blackened walls with sadness, deepening into "awe." "The wings" were "yet standing, though much
injured, and the school-house still more." A mass of ruins, the only memorial of a great and
benevolent scheme, it was also the memento of a great Methodistic evangelist, whom he revered as
his own precursor in the new world, the man who had heralded the still advancing host of itinerants.
If the ostensible design of the institution had failed, it had accomplished a greater result which was
destined never to fail: it had been the center of American attraction to its founder, had prompted his
thirteen passages across the Atlantic, and had thus led to those extraordinary evangelical travels and
labors, from Georgia to Maine, which quickened with spiritual life the Protestantism of the
continent, and opened the career of Methodism in the western hemisphere. Asbury returned with
pensive yet hopeful reflections to Savannah and resumed his work, preaching the same night. "I
reflected," he says, "upon the present ruins of the Orphan House, and taking a view of the money
expended, the persons employed, the preachers sent over, I was led to inquire, Where are they? and
how has it sped?" They were all "swallowed up;" the whole country looked "wretched" to him; "but,"
he adds; "here are souls, precious souls, worth worlds."
He was soon returning through South Carolina, "traveling through heavy rains and deep swamps,
in dark nights, improving" himself; as his "horseback study, in the Hebrew tones and points." He
paused again at Charleston, where he promoted a subscription for the erection of a new church,
preached, held class meetings, assembled the leaders and stewards, and visited from house to house.
His congregations included about five hundred hearers, three fifths of them blacks. He had now
summed up the Minutes for the ecclesiastical year. "We have," he writes, "two hundred and
seventeen traveling preachers, and about fifty thousand members, in the United States. Glory to God
in the highest!" He spent about two weeks in Charleston fortifying the society against its schismatic
troubles. We afterward trace him among the western mountains of North Carolina, "wrestling with
floods," his food "Indian bread and fried bacon," and his "bed set upon forks, and clapboards laid
across, in an earthen floor cabin." He crossed the Alleghenies through perilous difficulties, and was
again in the Great West, where he spent about six weeks among the emigrant settlements of
Tennessee and Kentucky, convoyed sometimes by armed guards, and enduring the severest
privations and fatigues. By the middle of May he was again among the heights of the Virginia
mountains, sheltered in the comfortable home of the widow of General Russell, the sister of Patrick
Henry, and one of the "elect ladies" of Methodism. The most romantic passages of his journals are
his brief records of his adventures among the Alleghenies, and often at the close of weary days does
he write, in log cabins, that so many miles yet remain before he can reach "General Russell's," his
longed-for resting-place. He now writes: "I am very solemn. I feel the want of the dear man who, I
trust, is now in Abraham's bosom, and hope ere long to see him there. He was a general officer in
the continental army, where he underwent great fatigue: he was powerfully brought to God, and for
a few years past was a living flame, and a blessing to his neighborhood. He went in the dead of
winter on a visit to his friends, was seized with an influenza, and ended his life from home. O that
the Gospel may continue in this house! I preached on Heb. xii, 1-4, and there followed several
exhortations. We then administered the sacrament, and there was weeping and shouting among the
people; our exercises lasted about five hours." Such scenes often occurred there, for Mrs. Russell
kept her mansion always open, not only for the shelter of the wayworn itinerants, but as a sanctuary